Large Scale Parallel Simulations of 3-D Cell Colony Dynamics

Biological processes are inherentlyvery complex and involve many unknown relationships and mechanisms at different scales. Despite many efforts, one still cannot explain all the observed phenomena and, if necessary, make any desirable changes in the dynamics. Recently, it has become apparent that the opportunity lies in complementing the traditional, heuristic experimental approach with mathematical modelling and computer simulations. Achieving a realistic simulation scale is still a huge challenge, however it is necessary to understand and control complex biological processes. In this paper we present a novel high performance computational approach allowing simulations of 3D cell colony dynamics in realistic, previously unavailable scale. Due to the high parallel scalability we are able to simulate cell colonies composed of 10⁹ cells, which allows for instance to describe tumor growth in its early clinical stage.